Florida Cops Laundered Millions For Drug Cartels, Failed To Make A Single Arrest

Posing as money launderers, police in Bal Harbour and Glades County, Fla. laundered a staggering $71.5 million for drug cartels in an undercover sting operation, according to an in-depth investigation by The Miami Herald. With fake identities, undercover officers made deals to pick up cash from criminal organizations in cities across the country. Agents then delivered the money to Miami-Dade storefronts and even wired cash to banks overseas in China and Panama. After laundering the cash, police would skim a three percent commission fee, ultimately generating $2.4 million for themselves.

“If you think of all the money that’s made from drugs, at some point it has to be cleaned up and become legit,” remarked Finn Selander, a former DEA agent and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. But unless proper precautions are taken, sting operations can “backfire” and “come back and bite you in the proverbial ass.”

Together, the Bal Harbour Police Department and the Glades County Sheriff’s Office formed the Tri-County Task Force, which, despite the name, consisted of only two agencies. From 2010 to 2012, the task force passed on information and tips to federal agencies that led to the government seizing almost $30 million. Yet the undercover unit laundered over $70 million for drug cartels—more than twice as much as what was actually taken off the streets.

In this, Tuesday, May 19, 2015 photo, the village of Bal Harbour, Fla., and its beach are shown. The city of Miami is seen in at rear. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

Notably, the Tri-County Task Force never made a single arrest. The task force countered that assertion, claiming they passed on intelligence that led to over 200 arrests made by other agencies. But a representative from the DEA said, “There’s no way we can validate those numbers. We have no idea what they are basing those numbers on.” Tellingly, “the task force did not document the names of the 200 people who were arrested,” according to The Miami Herald.

Thanks to the commissions from money laundering, the task force could indulge in a lavish lifestyle. Officers enjoyed $1,000 dinners at restaurants in the Miami area, and spent $116,000 on airfare and first-class flights and nearly $60,000 for hotel accommodations, including stays at the Bellagio and the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and El San Juan Resort & Casino in Puerto Rico. Police also spent over $100,000 on iPads, computers, laptops and other electronics, bought a new Jeep Grand Cherokee for $42,012 and even purchased $25,000 worth of weaponry, including FN P90 submachine guns. (Bal Harbour, a seaside village of 2,500 residents known for having the nation’s top sales-generating mall, reported just one violent crime in 2012.)

Initially, to gain seed capital to conduct the sting operations, Bal Harbour tapped into equitable sharing, a federal asset forfeiture program. Under equitable sharing, cash, cars and real estate can all be forfeited to the government if there is an alleged nexus between criminal activity and the property involved, though criminal convictions or indictments are not necessary. As Michael Sallah, the investigative reporter at the Herald who broke the story, noted, “The Tri-County Task Force’s entire sting operation could not have existed without the DOJ’s Equitable Sharing program.”

In fact, Duane Pottorff, the chief of law enforcement at the Glades County Sheriff’s Office, was remarkably candid about his agency’s motivations in joining the task force: “We thought this was a chance to bring in more revenue.” “Forfeiture money allowed us to have resources that normally we wouldn’t have,” including “patrol cars, vests, guns for the deputies, ammunition, all this, the training room, the training equipment is all paid with forfeiture funds,” he added.

Asset forfeiture can be immensely lucrative. In just Bal Harbour and Glades County, police spent nearly $10 million in equitable sharing funds. Statewide, The Washington Post found Florida law enforcement agencies have spent over $200 million worth of equitable sharing proceeds since 2008. About a fifth of these funds—almost $40 million—went to salaries and overtime.

Less than an hour away in Sunrise, law enforcement conducted “reverse” sting operations: Cops pretended to be drug dealers and then seized cash and cars from the prospective buyers. Police brought in nearly $6 million in forfeiture revenue in 2011 and 2012. According to the Sun Sentinel, one police informant earned over $800,000 “for her success in drawing drug dealers into the city.”

Earlier this year, Florida lawmakers considered legislation that would have banned law enforcement from keeping what they seize.Instead, forfeiture proceeds would fund charities or compensate victims. Not wanting to lose millions in future revenue, law enforcement groups heavily lobbied lawmakers to cut these much-needed reforms from the bill. But even the watered-down bill failed to pass the legislature.

Thanks to forfeiture, there are “too many hands in the cookie jar,” as Selander put it. Indeed, according to a report by the Institute for Justice, Florida and 40 other states allow police and prosecutors to keep at least a portion of forfeiture proceeds.

Lawmakers are taking action to curb policing for profit. Earlier this month, a new law took effect in New Mexico that bans law enforcement from keeping forfeiture proceeds. In February, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser signed a sweeping reform of the District’s civil forfeiture laws. Like New Mexico, forfeiture proceeds must be deposited directly into the city’s general fund. In the words of one councilman, when “forfeiture proceeds go directly to the law enforcement entity,” that creates “at best the appearance of a conflict of interest, and at worst, an unchecked incentive for slush funds.”

The desire for fast cash should not warp police priorities. As this money laundering scandal makes abundantly clear, lawmakers need to clean house on asset forfeiture.